


horizon line

by scioscribe



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Not Happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-15
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To correct perspective in art, one imagined a vanishing point: the exact spot on canvas or page where all the known lines disappeared.</p>
<p>Q had no gift for drawing, but he understood perspective and disappearance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	horizon line

**Author's Note:**

> I feel obliged to note: NOT A HAPPY STORY, PEOPLE.
> 
> I promise to do more 00Q that's not this downbeat.

Q loved art without understanding it. At university, he’d fallen in briefly with a crowd of artists, all of them young and sharp-pointed at the hips and hungry, always smoking, and they’d loved him and been contemptuous of him, slightly, the way people were of eager puppies that bounded around their feet and sometimes pissed on the rug.

One of them, Gwen, the one with the henna-dyed hair, had told him that he was all words and numbers, that he didn’t have anything real in him to make art _from_. He was too intellectual. Too careful.

“Cut your veins open,” she said, “and you’d bleed type and ink,” and then she had put his fingertips in her mouth, even though he’d been with Aaron then and she’d been with Michael, and he’d let her, because he wanted very much to at least fool the world into thinking he was real. An artist, or a poet, but Aaron, as it turned out, did not have an artist’s free-spirited sense of sex, and dropped him as soon as he smelled Gwen’s perfume on Q’s neck.

Q had been Quentin then, just as skinny as the artists, but never quite able to pick up smoking, and when Aaron had ended things, he’d bought a pinch of cocaine that was mostly baking powder from some long-haired campus boy, and lost the courage to sniff it, flushed it down the toilet instead, and that was the end of his pretentions at artistry, or even being the kind of person who went to bed with them.

But the love of paint and canvas had gotten under his skin. He could memorize the terminology and he could train his eye to see, but he couldn’t—quite—make his hands produce the movements.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Bond said.

“You wouldn’t know,” Q said.

But Bond was fascinated by his hands, and didn’t like to hear them slighted: he lifted one and skimmed his lips over the knuckles. “They’re talented in their way,” he said, although what Q did with Bond wasn’t art—compliment appreciated, however—and Q had decided at the beginning not to take anything Bond said in bed as true.

He wasn’t what Q had expected. He had approached the problem of getting James Bond into bed as an esoteric one, if potentially rewarding, something like the issue of solving the combative Rubik’s cube, but Bond had not been combative at all. Q had suspicions of prizes too easily won. It took him almost a month—he had strong points that weren’t art or observation—to realize that Bond had met his kiss easily not because Bond was, simply, easy, but because Q had, in a slightly cocked-up way, stolen Bond’s heart without meaning to. Now, of course, he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what to do with it, having never had experience in the area. The best solution was to pretend that Bond was one of those people whose still waters ran actually quite shallow, to pretend that he was only inclined to imagine depths, because if Bond loved Q, then Q might have to love him back, and he couldn’t think of anything worse than falling in love with James Bond.

And the ability to imagine worst-case scenarios was quite literally part of his job description, so:

“My hands do have a range of gifts a bit wider than yours,” he said, very aware that he was being a prick, but not seeing a way out of it.

Bond didn’t say anything.

Q said, “I can play the piano, for one,” as if that was all he had ever meant: _look, I have skills as of yet unforeseen by you_ , and Bond laughed exactly as if he believed this, and Q said, “One day I’ll buy one and show you.”

“I’d like that,” Bond said.

*

To correct perspective in art, one imagined a vanishing point: the exact spot on canvas or page where all the known lines disappeared.

Q had no gift for drawing, but he understood perspective and disappearance.

*

It was two weeks, that time, that Bond was missing. Q drank tea except at night, when he drank wine and whatever liquor Bond had left in his flat, to wipe his mind clean like a slate, except for the dreams that would surface occasionally like sharks to sink teeth into him. He brutally interrogated servers across the globe, collapsing systems in upon themselves, savaging them, until there were whole cities in blackout simply because Q couldn’t control his temper after finding fucking nothing for the eleventh fucking time that fucking morning, and he didn’t care who suffered for it.

When Bond did come back, only slightly the worse for wear, he said, “Did you miss me?”

“Barely noticed you were gone,” Q said, just as flippant. “Except for how I kept getting work done,” but their next time together, Bond’s fingers kept curling tightly around Q’s and Q kept not minding it, which was problematic.

When Bond fell asleep, Q said, “I don’t call you James even in my head,” as if as long as he didn’t, he would be completely and utterly safe, because what Q liked best about art was the interpretative possibility. _This is a painting about the inevitability of time_ and _This is a painting of a bloody big ship_. What Q knew about time was what Q knew about art. There were edges to it, horizon lines, the places beyond which nothing could be known.

Blackout areas.

He implanted a tracking device in Bond’s shoe. “Don’t lose it,” he said, “and don’t take it off unless you need to.”

“Don’t worry,” Bond said, and since no one was there, he put his hand on Q’s cheek. Bond was always thinking that he had to be reassured of things, and he wasn’t sure whether it was because he was younger or because he was, as Bond so obnoxiously put it, practically a civilian, but it was one of the things Q liked least about him even on the days when he couldn’t remember what he liked most. “I wouldn’t get rid of you.”

Every now and then, he simply said things like that as if he meant them utterly, and Q would think about the artists, Gwen and Aaron, who had said that love was a beautiful illusion cultivated by people who knew no better. (Except for when Aaron had chucked him, which was when he’d said that love was an illusion but wanting your boyfriend not to fuck other people wasn’t, and if Q had had any sense, he would have known the difference, which was, all in all, the most logical thing Aaron had said in Q’s six months of dating him.) He would try to remember that Bond’s apparent feelings for him were nothing more than a series of images, compressed moments that he could frame in his memory if he liked, and later burn when they weren’t of use.

Bond was a killer, and Q’s moral compass didn’t mind that as much as it should have, but the rest of him—the gut and throat and, yes, heart of him—minded that Bond was, in the bluntest possible terms, as likely to die as he was to murder. More so, really, when one took time into consideration. The long run.

“Chances are, I won’t even be the one monitoring it,” he said, although who else would, who would he trust with that except for himself? He couldn’t exactly ask someone to shoulder the responsibility of tracing the whereabouts of his operative-boyfriend-it’s-complicated, could he? But it did what it was meant to do, the way half what he said worked: it made Bond close up a little more, and move a little farther away. Q wanted to say, _I’m not an asshole, really_ , but it was possible that you were what you acted like that most, and with Bond, that didn’t leave him with too many options.

Interpretative possibilities.

_There’s a chance I’m terrified of you_ , he almost said, but instead he kissed Bond again, as if in apology, because it was easier. Solutions that solved nothing were always easier.

*

Bond said, “I don’t have to keep coming over.”

The horizon was where everything disappeared; the vanishing point; the frame. Beyond this, there could be no imagination.

Q said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I just have the feeling you’d rather I were somewhere else.”

_Well_ , Q thought, _only when you’re here_.

“You’re imagining things,” Q said, and Bond believed him, because Bond was strangely innocent about Q, in ways that Q—who knew about Vesper, who knew everything about Bond that was written down anywhere, and that was all of Bond there was to know—would not have suspected. It was the naïveté of someone who had only wanted to be a killer, not an artist, who was therefore more honest about what things meant. People were either dead or alive, Bond was either in love with him or wasn’t. (And he was. Even Q, very practiced in imagining ways that things could look like one thing while really being another, could no longer deny it.)

“Sorry, then,” Bond said, and smiled. “I can apologize.”

*

It wasn’t only that the vanishing point was the point where everything disappeared—as well as the title of a movie with an excellent car chase—it was also that it was the point, imagined in the distance, that all lines ran towards. Things vanished only in the direction they were heading. There was something paradoxical about that in some lovely way that Q could never define, and when he had asked Aaron about it, Aaron had said, “It’s a point on a page, Quentin,” and then reminded Q that he was a sculptor, anyway, as if Q had forgotten.

Bond had taken two art classes at university. If Q had asked him about it—Q was shit at art and love and interpretation and decision-making, but he was excellent at hypotheticals—he wouldn’t have liked Q knowing it, because he would have realized that Q had split his history open like a book and read it for pleasure (or a shiver, safe in his home, at the vicarious thrills and tragedies). But he would have gotten over it, because Bond had been managed and tugged and manipulated half his life by people who knew more about him than he knew about them, and he would have said, “It’s to keep your place in mind more than it’s to know where things end or where they’re going.”

He would have said, “Like the North Star,” and depending on where they would have been, where Q would have brought it up, he might have kissed Q’s neck, his collarbone. “It’s the point that everything else is in relation to.”

“ _Bloody big ship_ , you said,” Q would have said, chiding him, and Bond would have said, “You were being a twat, and anyway, I didn’t know you very well,” and Q would have said, “You don’t know me very well now,” or at least he could have said that, because he would have been thinking it, he was always thinking it, because there was no shelter safer than _you don’t know me and I don’t know you, not really, so this isn’t anything either of us has to worry about_.

If he’d said that, Bond would have pulled himself up on one elbow—all right, so it was a conversation they only would have had in bed—and said, “Tell me, then,” and Q would have—could have—said, “I love you, you don’t know that,” because he only intermittently knew it, didn’t want to know it, because James was doomed and damned and had been all the time Q had known him. But if he’d said that, James would have said, “No, that I knew,” and he would have been smiling.

He had a singularly beautiful smile. If art was the making something beautiful, and Q made James smile, then there, after all, he’d done it, he’d become that after all. Adolescent dream realized.

If they’d had that conversation.

*

The time in which they would have had it, Q determined, the perfect time for it, would have been the morning before James left for Portugal.

Instead, what happened was that Q woke up with a splitting headache and a chill all down one side where James had already rolled out of bed. He turned on his side to watch James dress, every single movement smooth and graceful, mechanical almost, and Q loved him so much he couldn’t breathe with it. Which was why one didn’t fall in love with agents anymore than one did with artists. (James had officially died at least three times that Q knew of and one day there would be a fourth and final, the damned fucking inevitability of time and James fucking Bond.)

“Why don’t you give it up?” he said, and it was as close as he ever came to saying what he wanted to say. “You’re older than most. You could—”

“This isn’t a conversation we’re having,” James said, buttoning his vest. “Go back to bed.”

Through the pain in his head, Q said, “You’re always leaving me behind.”

“This time I’m just leaving,” James said, not unkindly, and what he meant was _I’m just leaving_ you, and when he kissed Q it was firm and decided, a goodbye, and Q thought, _I should appreciate this_ , because it was the last time he would kiss James Bond, and it was the end of something, and wasn’t it better that it ended? It would save on pain. But by the time this worked through his mind and he tried to reach out to grab James’s shoulders, James was already pulling away.

Q said, “I don’t—”

“You don’t,” James said, with a funny, tense smile. “I know.”

And Q thought, _No, I do, that’s the whole problem_ , but it was easier that way, and his head hurt, so he let James go off to Portugal without the truth, and he never became an artist.

Everyone had regrets.

*

It was nine at night when it happened. Q was still on surveillance—he could hardly have pled a break-up for why he couldn’t have kept his eyes on his agent—and so he was watching, and listening, when the bullet went through James’s skull and pushed his body down to the ground. Q was drinking tea, and he didn’t spill it, just put the cup down very carefully. “Agent down,” he said, as if he were the only one in the branch calling it into the microphones, and then he went down the hall, found a bin, and vomited.

He thought, _I never played the piano for you, I never told you, I never—_

_I never even fucking called you James, I never, oh fuck, I’m so fucking sorry, I’m so—_

Vanishing point.

The limitations of knowledge; the horizon line.

Unless James was/would have been right, in which case Q had lost his vanishing point, his destination, his place, his North Star, Polaris—lost it and not arrived at it. He wanted to sit down on the floor for a bit and think all this through, because it seemed important, but he had to go make the report to M. He was Bond’s quartermaster, after all. Procedures had to be followed.

He got in without having to wait.

“It’s a ridiculous rule,” M said, not even looking up at first. “It isn’t as though I haven’t already heard it from a dozen people.”

Q nodded. It was ridiculous. Most things were ridiculous. He didn’t have the proper boundaries to his world anymore, which was what happened when the vanishing point vanished, or got shot just above his left eye. Everything had gotten totally fucked, perspective-wise, like the lines of M’s desk were stretching out to near infinity.

He said, “James Bond, 007, killed in action in Lisbon.”

“This is going to be the most godawful mess this department’s seen since—well, you’d remember, it was part Bond then, too.” M glanced up and then said, “Ah. I suppose that answers the questions I had about those rumors. Sit down, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t want to talk,” Q said.

“I don’t give a damn if you talk or not, I just don’t want you to faint. Sit down.”

Q sat. He held onto the arms of the chair, because of the crookedness of the room, the way the chair might buck and throw him miles away if he weren’t careful. His lips felt numb. If he hadn’t brushed his teeth, he might have been able to convince himself that the taste of James was still somewhere on his tongue, beneath the tea and the evening’s takeout, but that was gone, too—Q had lost him completely.

“You can take some time off,” M said. He was back to filling out paperwork. He still wasn’t looking up—it was kindness, Q thought, not squeamishness. He was giving Q as close as he could come to privacy.

So he owed it to M to say, “No. It’s fine.”

“Don’t be a martyr. It isn’t the Stone Age. I can’t promise that people won’t talk, but talk will be all it is. You’ll still have a place to come back to.”

“You don’t understand,” Q said. _If you cut my veins open, there’d be nothing but type and ink._ “It wasn’t like that.”

“It was like something,” M said. “Go home.”

Q went home. One side of the bed still smelled a little like James’s cologne, just on the pillow, and Q didn’t gather it up against him, because he didn’t have the right to that anymore than he had the right to grieve. James had said, _You don’t_ , and Q hadn’t argued with him, because wouldn’t it be horrid to be in love with him and to know what he did, what could happen to him? Q had seen the bullet coming, after all. He had known it was out there. He just hadn’t avoided it, for all his trying.

He loved art without understanding it, and he had loved James Bond the same way, and it was too late to do anything about any of it, so he did all he could think of. He went out, never mind the time, and found an all-night antiques shop. The things one stumbled across in London, honestly, and people called Amsterdam eccentric. His hands were cold, and he hadn’t even realized until then that it was snowing, which was strange. When he found what he wanted, he said, “I’ll take it. Now. Cash. Do you deliver?”

“At one in the morning?”

“I wasn’t aware of the precise time,” he said, “but if that’s now, then yes.”

The woman shrugged. “It’ll cost extra.”

“That’s not a problem.” He thought of James’s ridiculously outmoded sincerity and his scrupulous—post-resurrection—attention to the documents surrounding his death. “I have the feeling I’m to come into a bit of money soon, anyway.”

The piano arrived at his flat around three, and Q apologized to all his neighbors for the racket. He said, “A touch of trouble at work,” and since half of them thought he worked for a branch of some prestigiously secretive tech company, they all hushed and likely made plans to rearrange their stock portfolios. He made plans to send around fruit baskets later.

He would have to buy flowers, too. For the funeral. He’d never bought anyone flowers before.

“First a piano, then flowers,” he said to the silence. “You _are_ becoming expensive. You were never this needy before.”

Q didn’t believe in ghosts, but he would have been grateful for them.

He sat down to play. It was art, of sorts, but without any kind of vanishing point or horizon line, and when he came to the end, to the limitations of what he could remember or see, he simply had to stop. His face was a bit wet. He went to bed, and, out of habit, stayed rigidly aligned along one side.


End file.
